


Wide Eyed Wonder

by VioletLopez



Category: Newsies (1992), Newsies - All Media Types, Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: Introspection, Mental Health Issues, but like, he needs to talk about his Feelings but he doesnt, lowkey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-26 22:39:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12567788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VioletLopez/pseuds/VioletLopez
Summary: Sometimes I wonder.~~Alternative title: 533 words of lowkey depression





	Wide Eyed Wonder

Sometimes I wonder.

 

I mentioned it once, when I was talking to Specs, just in an offhand sort of way. He looked at me strange and told me that my sort of wondering wasn’t normal, in a tone of voice that seemed fragile, like he was afraid to offend me. We dropped the subject.

 

It’s not normal. I could have puzzled that out myself without Specs’ help. But just because it’s not normal doesn’t make it a phenomenon. I may not be normal, but I’m perfectly sane.

 

“You’re sane,” Dutchy told me one night as we walked back to the lodging house. “You’re just… strange.”

 

I do believe it’s the nicest thing he’s ever said to me.

 

A lot of people have called me strange. By this point it’s practically a synonym to my name, like if you looked up strange in the dictionary it’d have Skittery written right there next to it.

 

Or is that the definition?

 

What’s it matter?

 

Anyway, I’ve gotten off track. None of this has got to do with wandering. No - wondering. That’s what this was about, isn’t it? Wondering; pondering what it’s like.

 

I rode a boat one time, when I was a child. It sailed from a French port to New York and I sailed along. Back then, standing on the boat and staring at the waves, all I wondered was when I would get off. Now when those waves ripple across my memory, I see ripples of unrelenting time.

 

It was years ago, now that this wondering began. I was a child, maybe ten or eleven or something along those lines, and I was sitting with Specs on the rooftop, on top of the world. (Our world, at least, a world that doesn’t matter to any other world out there.) I was sitting there and letting my legs hang over the edge, and I kicked them a little and stared at the ground and I wondered.

 

Then I realized I was wondering, so I pulled my legs up and left the roof. Specs didn’t follow.

 

After that, though, the wondering didn’t stop. It just went on and on, constant and silently demanding an answer. A question I can’t ask, a thirst for fire. I can’t know, because the moment my question is answered is the moment I stop knowing anything at all.

 

“I don’t understand you,” Specs told me one time, when it was late and we were shivering and I wanted him to come out in the snow and look at the stars with me. “You’ve got an odd mind, you know that?” I shrugged and pulled him out the door.

 

The others don’t understand it, this burning question. The longer time prolongs me, the more desperate my wondering becomes, and I find myself tempting fate in reckless ways, wondering if perhaps I should find my answer sooner than whatever deity up above has planned.

 

I always back out. The others don’t know about that sort of wondering.

 

Sometimes I go out on the bridge at dusk, when the day is beginning to die, and I lean out so that I’m almost falling. No one questions me, just the kid on the bridge that doesn’t fit into their agenda. So I stand there staring downwards and I wonder - what is it like to die?


End file.
